Your business needs to ensure your IT infrastructure is running as efficiently and securely as possible. For some companies, this is perfectly manageable in-house. For others, it means spending a monthly outlay to have all IT systems managed by an expert IT support company.

But in either scenario, it’s worth considering if you’re managing your IT proactively or reactively. That is to say, do you have an IT plan and strategy that takes into account what your business wants to achieve, potential roadblocks and opportunities? Or do you simply muddle along and react when something goes wrong?

Let’s take a look at the difference:

What is proactive IT support

Proactive IT support, in a nutshell, is focused on prevention and mitigation strategies. An IT support company will have set up all the infrastructure to be able to monitor your systems, and flag up issues as they arise rather than waiting for a problem to occur.

Proactive tactics might include Cybersecurity Management, Detection and Response (MDR), security patch management, remote systems monitoring and maintenance and disaster recovery.

Not only does this leave you feeling in control of your IT – your data, your systems, your operations – but you significantly reduce the extent of any damage to your IT.

What is reactive IT support?

Reactive IT support is the supply of IT services as and when needed. Whether with your internal IT resource or managed service provider, reactive support is your safety net for when things go wrong.

You might have a problem with one of your computers, your network may have gone down, or you may have encountered a security breach. Whatever the issue, you’d pick up the phone and report the issue, and expect the IT expert to troubleshoot, and hopefully resolve, the problem.

The benefit of outsourced IT service is that it’s more affordable than a fully-rounded IT support package. It might be useful for a young or growing business with a limited budget, or for growing companies with existing IT expertise.

Difference between reactive and proactive IT support

In a nutshell, the main differences between reactive and proactive IT support can be explained like this:

Reactive support	Proactive support
The burden is on the customer to ask for support	Customer-centric
The underlying cause for a problem isn’t resolved and so the problem can recur.	Underlying causes are resolved so the frequency of recurrent issues is reduced.
The cost per user tends to increase as businesses grow.	The cost per user tends to remain constant or is reduced as businesses grow.
Minor issues can develop into catastrophes	Stops minor issues from becoming catastrophes
A time-consuming process of logging issues	Saves time
Higher chance of costly downtime	Save costs, in the long run,

 

Why it’s important to find a proactive IT support provider

It saves you time

When something goes wrong with your IT, the last thing you want to do is spend hours on hold, waiting for an expert to be able to help you. With a reactive service, this is exactly what happens. The time it takes to realise the problem has occurred, report the problem, and have it diagnosed, fixed or replaced, can cause a big dent in a company’s bottom line.

With a proactive IT support service, many issues will be detected before they become a problem, back-ups will be in place, and the experts will be on-hand to ensure that the issues are dealt with as quickly and efficiently as possible.

It’s cost-effective in the long run

Although it might seem like you’re paying over the odds, with a proactive support package, you’ll be unlikely to experience any financial shocks when something goes wrong. Reactive services, by contrast, are unpredictable, meaning that when something fails, you have to pay for it to be resolved.

By paying a flat monthly fee for a more robust proactive service, you can stay in control of your budget and costs.

It improves productivity and morale

IT problems occur all the time in any given business, and these issues can be disruptive to both staff productivity and morale. By securing a proactive IT service, you take the uncertainty out of IT issues, and let your teams focus on what they do best.

What are the benefits of proactive IT support?

Proactive IT support helps provide the conditions in which a company can get on with what it does best and, in turn, thrive:

• Your entire IT and cybersecurity systems are monitored and maintained so that potential threats or issues are detected and fixed before they become a major problem.
• When IT issues do occur, your IT support will make tailored suggestions to ensure the problem doesn’t happen again.
• The responsibility is shared – by paying a monthly fee to an IT support expert, you can trust that your network and systems will be kept running efficiently and safely.
• You’ll have predictable expenses rather than sudden unexpected costs when something goes wrong.
• You’ll benefit from expert-level skills and tools from your IT support company itself and the partnerships it has with other major providers.
• With proactive IT support, you’ll limit the chances and extent of serious IT problems that might cause data loss, expensive downtime and major disruptions to your business as usual.
• You’ll benefit from a more consistent and predictable working environment in the knowledge your IT systems are being kept maintained and secured.

How to find a proactive IT support provider?

If you’re looking to find a proactive IT support provider, Equity is the place to go. Right from the get-go, we work closely with you to tailor the right IT package to suit both your strategic need and your budget.

Our whole outlook is to ensure that we’re there to support your business as it grows, and that means enabling your IT systems to run efficiently and securely in the background.

We offer packages that manage the entire setup, maintenance and monitoring of your IT infrastructure and cybersecurity and work closely with you to advise on new tools and techniques as they come on the market. We’ll also help you devise a disaster management plan so that when a problem arises, its impact on your business is kept to an absolute minimum.

With Equity, you can be assured that your IT systems are being looked after, so you can focus on running your business.